CBA Prof Suggests Firefighting Approach Can Cool Business Crises Date: June 2, 2000 By: Carey Hoffman Phone: (513) 556-1825 Photo by: Lisa Ventre Archive: General News There's an attention-grabbing commercial airing for a computer company right now. A group of executives in weekend wear sits anxiously around the company's big conference table in a darkened room. A computer system failure has completely crippled their e-business. In this time-critical situation, they are desperately struggling with how to resolve the disaster. This is exactly the kind of scenario Greg Bigley loves to analyze. Bigley, an assistant professor of management in the College of Business Administration, studies organizational behavior and human resource management. His work is based on the idea that the increasing demands of the modern business environment – with intense competition, complex and rapidly changing information and communication technologies, and turbulent global markets -- have placed an expanding number of organizations in situations where failures to rapidly adapt, errors in core operations and other miscues can have catastrophic consequences. So, how do companies maintain resiliency and flexibility, prevent breakdowns and minimize damage when system failures do occur? For Bigley, the answer involved calling 911. Over the last several years, Bigley has spent considerable time riding along with, observing and interviewing members of a county fire department in California that bases its emergency operations on an approach to organizing called the incident command system (ICS). The ICS quickly organizes diverse resources, in the forms of know-how and equipment, at the scene of an emergency, often under extremely volatile, hazardous, and time-constrained situations. Firefighters have relied on the ICS for 25 years to both mitigate threats to public safety and, at the same time, prevent the degradation of their own operations under exceedingly demanding conditions. One of the most surprising results Bigley found is that bureaucratic elements, such as pronounced hierarchy and highly specialized roles, within the system actually aid flexibility instead of hinder it. "Skillful activation or deployment of structural building blocks enhances organizational flexibility in the ICS," Bigley says. "Structural elements in combination with highly developed processes for handling them produce the flexible and adaptive capabilities for which the ICS is noted." In addition, the fire professionals Bigley observed and interviewed deeply trusted the principles of the ICS, which is used in a wide variety of situations, urban and wildland fires, hazardous materials spills, multi-casualty medical aids, and wide-area search and rescues. For instance, one battalion chief Bigley interviewed described how the ICS helped thousands of firefighters – some who had come in from different parts of the country – battle a wildland fire that consumed 70,000 acres and lasted more than a week. "The incident command system at that time was developed to the point to where it had not only an incident commander to operations, but the fire also had four branches," the chief recalled. "Those branches were divided into about 20 divisions, and then those divisions were further divided down into the strike teams. It organized it so that everybody that had a part in the fire worked together so that they all had the ultimate goal of to knock this thing down and put it out. Regardless of your part in the fire, you knew that with what you were doing, with what someone else was doing, it was organized before you even went out there as to what the expected outcome would be." "Firefighters feel confident that the ICS can handle almost anything, if executed properly," Bigley says. "That general system trust is critical for organizational cohesiveness." Bigley looks forward to examining ways these principles can translate to the business world. For instance, he sees parallels for a situation where a company in a just-in-time supply network must deal with the breakdown of a main partner. Bigley worked with Karlene Roberts from the University of California-Berkeley on the study. The two have a paper, "Structuring Temporary Systems for High Reliability," that is to be presented at the Academy of Management meetings in Toronto in August and is also under review for publication in a major management journal.